Some Definitions and News From South Dakota

I just learned from my favorite science blog, Pharyngula, that the South Duh-kota senate passed resolution [HCR 1009] that contained the following point about global warming: "the South Dakota Legislature urges that instruction in the public schools relating to global warming include the following - that there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect [sic] world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative...."
Remember, this is the state whose state animal is the coyote but there's a bounty on coyotes. I guess I shouldn't be too harsh about that since my state animal, the California grizzly, is extinct.
So, here are some "definitions": astrology = NOT science, astronomy = science, thermology = a branch of medicine involving infra-red imaging of the human body, irrelevant to global warming studies, cosmology = can range from science to religion, depending on how it is practiced; one suspects that the SD resolution is referring to cosmology in the Biblical sense. While I'm at it, my blog identifies me as a naturalist, not to be confused with naturist. The former is currently a kind of science - what my late professor Archie Carr would call "whole animal" science, as opposed to microbiology and other branches of biology in which the practitioners often know all about the cells of animals that they wouldn't recognize in their natural habitat. Naturalists before Darwin were mostly creationists and studied lots of animals after shooting them. Modern practice of natural history is, hopefully, quite scientific, and is centered around studying the behaviors and characteristics of whole animals and plants (and fungi, protists, and bacteria) in their natural settings. Naturists, on the other hand, are people who like to live in the nude whenever possible and are often politically engaged in advocating the rights of nudists to do just that. One of these days soon I'll complete and post my essay, "A History of Natural History," in which I discuss how the practice has become more scientific since Darwin as we moved from the shotgun and poisons as primary tools to cameras, sketchbooks, and audio recorders. As Yogi Berra once said, "You can see a lot if you look."